How to avoid returning certain properties and Foreign Entities when calling GetProperties on an Entity?

Question

I am making the call:

var properties = person.GetType().GetProperties(BindingFlags.DeclaredOnly |
                                                        BindingFlags.Public |
                                                        BindingFlags.Instance);

This returns what I want except for, it also returns a property I don't want called Updated, but I can easily just ignore this. It also returns CarReference and Car which I don't want to include. How can I exclude these fields? Currently, I have a list of excluded properties and if the name matches one of those, I just skip over it, but I want it to be more generic instead of hard-coding "CarReference" and "Car" for example

Answer 1

I don't know if this is what you are looking for, but here is a snippet which could help you. There are criterions for some properties of automatically generated Entity Framework "Entity" classes:

var flags = BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance;
var destinationProperties = typeof(TDestination).GetProperties(flags);

foreach (var property in destinationProperties)
{
    var type = property.PropertyType;

    // Ignore reference property (e.g. TripReference)
    if (type.IsGenericType && type.GetGenericTypeDefinition() == typeof(EntityReference<>))
    {
        // ...
    }

    // Ignore navigation property (e.g. Trips)
    if (type.IsGenericType && type.GetGenericTypeDefinition() == typeof(EntityCollection<>))
    {
        // ...
    }

    // Ignore ID (edmscalar) property (e.g. TripID)
    if (property.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(EdmScalarPropertyAttribute), false).Any())
    {
        // ..
    }

Answer 2

Use the "Namespace" property listed in the PropertyType, Foreign Entities would be skipped by the following statement: if (type.Namespace != "System")

        using (var db = new Entities.YourEntities())
        {
            var originalObj = db.MyTable.FirstOrDefault();

            foreach (var prop in originalObj.GetType().GetProperties())
            {
                var type = prop.PropertyType;

                if (type.Namespace != "System")
                    continue;

                var name = prop.Name;
                var value = prop.GetValue(originalObj, null);

                //your code here
            }
        }